In-person: Q&A with filmmaker Shireen Seno moderated by UCLA Associate Professor Jasmine Nadua Trice.

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Maybe I'm Unlucky Because I Cut My Nails at Night

Philippines, 2022

A superstition warns that cutting nails at night brings bad luck. In this experimental short, it becomes a lens for reflecting on the erasure of Philippine history under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and, later, his son. Maria Estela Paiso evokes this historical erasure by making subjects vanish from her personal photos, like ghosts. The film unfolds as a quiet elegy for memory itself — a meditation on what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.

DCP, color, 5 min. Director/Screenwriter: Maria Estela Paiso.
 

Nervous Translation

Philippines, 2017

Nervous Translation follows Yael, an 8-year-old who spends much of her time alone with her imagination: she plays with a miniature kitchen set and secretly records her parents’ long-distance audio correspondence. Blending realism with dreamlike storytelling, Shireen Seno captures the quiet loneliness, curiosity and unspoken emotions of childhood, where understanding and explanation comes in fragments. The New Yorker called it “among the best recent evocations of a child’s life and thought, and among the most sophisticated.”

DCP, color, 90 min. Director/Screenwriter: Shireen Seno. With: Jana Agoncillo, Angge Santos, Sid Lucero, Cocoy Lumbao.

—Public Programmer Beandrea July